THE EGS5 CODE SYSTEM

ten for energies less than 100 MeV and later extended to 1 GeV[16], ran significantly slower than
EGS3. However, in spite of its accuracy and availability, ETRAN went unnoticed in the world of
high-energy physics during this period.
1.2.5 EGS4
EGS3 was designed to simulate electromagnetic cascades in various geometries and at energies up
to a few thousand GeV and down to cutoff kinetic energies of 0.1 MeV (photons) and 1 MeV
(electrons and positrons). However, ever since the introduction of the code in 1978 there had been
an increasing need to extend the lower-energy limits—i.e., down to 1 and 10 keV for photons and
electrons, respectively. Essentially, EGS3 had become more and more popular as a general, lowenergy,
electron-photon transport code that could be used for a variety of problems in addition to
those generally associated with high-energy electromagnetic cascade showers. It had many features
that made it both general as well as versatile, and it was relatively easy to use, so there had been a
rapid increase in the use of EGS3 both by those outside the high-energy physics community (e.g.,
medical physics) and by those within. Even though other low-energy radiation transport codes were
available, most notably ETRAN[15, 18, 19] and its progeny[46, 68], there had been many requests
to extend EGS3 down to lower energies and this was a major, but not the only, reason for creating
EGS4. The various corrections, changes and additions, and new features that were introduced in
the 1985 release of the EGS4 Code System[126] are summarized below.
Summary of EGS3 to EGS4 conversion
As with any widely used code, there had been many extensions made to EGS3 and many small
errors found and corrected as the code was used in new situations. The following lists the most
significant differences between EGS3 and EGS4.
• Major Changes and Additions to EGS3.
– Conversion from MORTRAN2 to MORTRAN3.
– Corrections to logic and coding errors in EGS3.
– Extension of electron transport down to 10 keV (kinetic energy).
– Improved Sternheimer treatment of the density effect.
– Improved definition of the radiation length at low atomic numbers.
• New Options and Macros.
– Macro templates for introduction of weighting and biasing techniques.
– Pi-zero option.
– Rayleigh scattering option.
– Compton electron stack position preference (macro).
– Positron discard option (macro) for creation of annihilation gammas.
• Auxiliary Subprograms and Utilities.
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